Due to the vast and increasing amount of traffic generated by consumers on the Internet, businesses continue to seek more effective means to advertise their goods and services online. An advertiser is generally a merchant of goods and/or services willing to pay to have its ads presented to consumers online. The advertiser may use its own data about consumers and/or a data provider to determine which consumers to present the ads to. Such consumer data may include demographic information, preferences, interests, etc., which is used to select and serve a particular ad to a particular consumer.
In an effort to spend their online advertising budgets on those consumers who will most likely be interested in their ads, advertisers develop “ad campaigns” or marketing plans that identify certain types of consumers as targets for given products or services. In other cases, advertisers may be unsure of what types of consumers are most likely to respond to a given product and/or ad, and may wish to gather specific information about the consumers viewing various types of websites and responding to their ads. The advertisers may then develop a targeted ad campaign or marketing strategy (e.g., for a particular, good service, and/or ad) based on the gathered information.
Implementing targeted ad campaigns requires the audience intelligence providers to gather and process information about consumers, which is known as “profiling.” One way intelligence providers gather consumer information is by tracking consumers as they surf the Internet using “cookies.” Generally, a cookie is a small piece of data placed on the user's browser when the user visits a website belonging to ad network. The cookie usually contains, among other things, a unique identifier associated with the user. The cookie may contain other information, such as date and time information, an estimated zip code of the user, and browser history information. The cookie is stored for a specified time and returned whenever the user subsequently visits that website or another website in the ad network. By compiling and analyzing cookie information associated with a particular user gathered across multiple websites, a “user profile” indicating various attributes, preferences, and/or interests of the consumer can be built. This profile may then be used by ad networks and/or ad exchanges to support targeted ad campaigns. Of course, other consumer tracking methods may be used by intelligence providers to gather information about consumers and build user profiles.
Some people find such consumer tracking and profiling methods employed by online advertisers to be intrusive or invasive. These privacy concerns have encouraged online advertising companies to form self-regulating cooperatives to ensure that consumer privacy is protected in the advertising process. One such cooperative is the Network Advertising Initiative (“NAI”), which provides various tools for consumers to educate themselves in relation to online advertising and protect their privacy online. For example, NAI's website allows users to access information about how targeted advertising works, the privacy policy of the ad networks participating in the cooperative, and other related information. In addition, NAI's website provides a tool allowing the user to selectively “opt-out” of targeted advertising by one or more of the participating networks.
Generally, opting-out is a process by which a user may avoid receiving further targeted advertising. Usually this involves replacing the unique identifier in the cookie on the user's browser with some type of opt-out identifier, creating an opt-out cookie. When the user subsequently visits a website in the ad network, the opt-out cookie is returned, and the website can no longer track the user's browser history, build or update user profiles, etc. Moreover, to the extent that an ad is requested and delivered to the user, the ad is generic and not selected based on any particular information about the user.
Another way of opting-out is through the use of the Do-Not-Track (“DNT”) field in the HTTP header of a web browser. However, the DNT header may not be user-effectuated because a web browser, a router, computer, Internet service provider, and/or other network appliances may automatically set the DNT header to not track the consumer without the consumer's consent. Moreover, the DNT header is a cooperative solution based on an honor system and, therefore, not universally accepted. Each of these opting-out techniques has various drawbacks.